A terrific early modern English interjection, indicating surprise, appropriate to mark the conclusion of the A-to-Z Challenge, blogging through April, and tipping up finally at Z.
Over the month I’ve fully reacquired my writing-and-publishing enjoyment. Now, having spent time wandering into a room filled with intriguing dust-sheet shapes and frisking off the covers, I realise there’s a few items that need shifting around, updating, or just moving on.
Bear with me while this spring cleaning continues! Thanks for reading, and see you in a few days or so for scheduling updates.
In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. – Gail Andrews in Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
I’m mostly with DNA on this matter, and the character of Gail Andrews as more of a psychologist with schtick than an actual astrologer is quite a relaxed take compared to the foaming that some rationalist people achieve when provoked by That Which Is Not Science. Which I tend to see as a bit of a shame, really, because the mind has lots of blind spots that practices such as astrology, tarot and I Ching can be useful to circumvent. They are all “just” ways of thinking about problems.
While of course they can be seen as a waste of time when one might simply, like, think about the problem, it is equally true that one’s biases, preoccupations, current ways of thinking, can get right in the way of intuitive processes. Using a game like tarot or astro, with their well-defined rules and parameters for arriving at understanding, can be a helpful way to sneak round those barriers.
Approaching the close of the A-to-Z Challenge, today I was reminded of a familiar sinking feeling I’ve had in previous years, getting to the back end of the alphabet and noticing that the waters are a bit murky.
Fortunately, I managed to hop aboard this helpful passing vessel and it was all plain sailing thereafter.
Found myself wanting to write about a number of different topics here that were all “something underground”, so I’ll pop this here as a trailer for some Upcoming Underground Attractions
Fishing about in the files for something appropriate I might reconfigure for today’s “T” post, I came across a commentary from 2007, about Tom Jones and Robbie Williams.
Don’t fret, I’m not going paste it in here. Re-reading it, it comes over as a work in translation, weirdly-phrased and disjointed, lacking some kind of cultural referent to help it make sense.
I scanned it marvelling at how I might have spent the time bashing out 1,279 words on something of such inconsequentiality, and what I might have been thinking I was going to do with it.
Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. – Robert Fulghum
I am amused to discover that this quotation from “All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” also pertains to cobblers.
As alluded to earlier this April, this whole project of Getting Back To The Blog has been prompted in part by movements away from a short attention span communication ethic. It’s so widespread as to be inescapable, the ways in which people seem to be growing exhausted by the so-often-called toxic sumps of social media that have come to dominate the discourse. And so switching either off completely, or at least from the shallows to longer-form, deliberate media (in the range of senses that word ‘deliberate’ might evoke).
Less frantic, more thoughtful posting?
Not that “getting back to…” is a new notion, either in terms of teh internets or of course offline. People have been Golden Age hankering as long as they’ve been committing characters to medium. Even keeping it to this context, various people online have been referring to the blogosphere, the Republic of Bloggers, the Isles of Blogging, at various points over the last 15 years or so; a distinct location with a distinct approach to expression. It usually posits a view against whatever might be the current iteration of social media and for something more, well, social.
“Yeah, but THIS time though…”
I mean, of course that kind of thinking invites at least a slightly raised eyebrow – not least as blogging remains largely monologue until people start saying hello. Calling across the channels between? Nonetheless, something in the waters has resonated enough to trip my sensors [image: some kind of Heath Robinson aquativibe-o-meter device…]. Multiple writers I admire have been consciously configuring their blogs and newsletters, offering increasingly bespoke curations of idiosyncrasies. Personal expressions of ideas and interests, like what it used to be [gummy old timer voice].
Getting away from (doom)scrollin’ and sitting still with ideas. Just wanted to start this week off with some scene-setting, what’s been going on in the background with me anyway, to foreground it as motivation and ethic.
Speaking of personal expressions of interest, among the musical influences saving my life since yesteryear… our title today is inspired by the lamented, celebrated Prince, who left this dimension eight years ago yesterday.
My notes for today started with ‘reorganisation – reconfiguration’, front of mind expressions of how the land lies here in late April 2024. There’s been spring cleaning inside and outside the house as well as inside and outside the self, sun and breezes illuminating and refreshing, literally and figuratively.
Looking at the shelves for the Poetics post on Thursday last had me eyeing up other sections of the Mortal Bath library and wondering about how well they’d enjoy a refit, not through dissatisfaction so much as a glad recognition that some items on the shelves do not carry the same significance as once they did, and can be moved along without concern.
The dual implications of the ‘re’ prefix – ‘back’ and ‘again’ are interesting though because what I was grasping at with the hand-wafting ‘reorganisation – reconfiguration’ pair was in fact neither a return to a previous state, nor to repeat steps previously taken. The tack, the trend is more of an urge to turn, to peat; to action things yet-to-be done.
Any movement on of something therefore is not to make room for new versions of the same things, but to do perhaps something else with the space entirely.
The air and spring sun has been particularly fine outside today.
(This week, because the catalogue yields such riches, and of course I could have gone all Save Me Black Queen Get Down Make Love Battle With My Car Attack b-side nerd face… and not in any order either… and not ten tracks… and no Bohemian Rhapsody, because that’s like The Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare on Desert Island Discs, just there.)
Killer Queen
Bicycle Race
Seven Seas of Rhye
Somebody to Love (Live at the Bowl, Milton Keynes)
the mortal bath 